Questions about office printing supplies

[Miss Chicken]

I have just read this article

IT HAS been dubbed "toner-gate" - a three-week, $300,000 splurge on printer ink by Liberal MPs to stock up on office supplies for the pending federal election. After being told in September 2009 that a strict finance cap would be introduced from October 1 that year, Opposition members ordered $267,288 worth of printer cartridge toner, according to documents obtained through Freedom of Information.
With the election almost a year away, some Liberal figures claimed they were told by party HQ to be "ruthless" ordering taxpayer-funded supplies ahead of the campaign.
One Liberal MP, West Australian Don Randall, ordered $25,414.68 of toner cartridges for his office printer, while South Australian Patrick Secker spent $21,797.74.

SOURCE

I was wondering - how much room do you think $25,000 worth of toner cartridges would take up and how many pages would that amount of toner print? Does anyone have any idea?

 

[Jadzia]

If we're talking 10% coverage which is the typical office letter, I'd I imagine a £100 black toner would print about 1000 pages before the print begins to look faded.

If we're talking full colour prints, it would be a lot less.

For $25,000, we're talking about a couple of hundred toners, so about 200,000 letters or 20,000 full colour pages. Double/triple those figures if we accept prints that look a bit faded. That's enough to distribute around a big town/small city.

A couple of hundred toners could fit into a 6x6x6 cube, and if each toner box is a bit smaller than a shoebox, the total volume would be no bigger than an armchair.

 

[Miss Chicken]

Thanks for the info.

Don Randall's electorate has about 85,000 voters in it. Therefore $25,000 would probably mean about 2 or 3 good quality black and white pages per voter, assuming he sent letters to each and every voter. That doesn't seem too excessive IMO.

 

[Kitty Worrier]

The toner cartridges I buy for work are largerthan shoeboxes (some twice the size), so it depends on what kind of machine the toner is meant for: basic ink-jet desktop printers, or much larger office printers or even printer/copier combos.

 

[Miss Chicken]

Yes, it would help if we had some idea what sort of printer/s Don Randall has.

However I just wanted a broad idea whether or not $25,000 would take up considerable office space or not, and a rough idea how many pages could be printed with this amount of ink.

Even if it took up twice the size that Jadzia said it still wouldn't be that much space.

 

[Jadzia]

The toners that print 10,000 pages are bigger, yes, but they also cost a lot more that £100 so you'd get less of them

 

[the skullcowboy]

I have to agree with Kitty, it would take a huge amount of space and the laser printer cartridge can print about 2500 b&w documents per ( the color averages between 1200-1500) thinking of a bulk buy and getting a deal of say $39.99 each( the average price for one being between 59.99 and 89.99 )you are looking at 630-some-odd toner cartridges and if they were all black you'd be looking at 1,600,000 pages, my question would then be...how much did they spend on paper reams?

 

[Kitty Worrier]

^ The stuff I buy is around $50 to $55 and can yield 10,000 to 17,000. The cartridges that are around $25 yield 2,500 copies. It depends on a lot of factors, probably, like the machine and the brand you are buying.

Either way, this stuff will take up a lot of space, not to meantion the paper.

 

[the skullcowboy]

Totally agree and I can't even fathom the total amount of pages that would yield, however I think a small forest just shuddered lol